by Rachel Bach
With the words came a feeling of broken promises and an image of a man standing before a circle of alien figures so enormous I couldn’t comprehend them. But that wasn’t what got me. What got me was that I recognized the man.
It was Caldswell. He looked about a decade younger and he was wearing a Republic officer’s coat, and at his side was Maat. The real Maat, not a daughter. I couldn’t say how I was so sure, but I knew it was her without a doubt. She was kneeling on the ground, clutching Caldswell’s sleeve and begging him, pleading with tears in her eyes for him not to do something. Before I could figure out what, though, the image vanished.
We come, the lelgis said. Go now, death bringer. Never return.
I was about to call bullshit on that when something hit me. It felt like I’d fallen ten stories and landed face-first on the ground, but instead of stopping, I was blown back through the emptiness. I flew forever, going faster and faster and faster. And then, like a bullet breaking through ice, I crashed back into my body.
I woke with a start to find myself pinned tight against something hard that was moving very quickly, bouncing up and down through somewhere dim and gray. It was so weird that if it wasn’t for the Lady’s familiar heads-up displays scattered across my vision, I’d have worried I was still dreaming. I shifted experimentally, testing my fingers. My left hand felt fine, but my right felt very odd. I spent several seconds in confusion over this before I realized my right arm felt funny because it wasn’t armored.
“Well, look who’s come to,” said a smug, familiar voice. “Welcome back to the party, Morris.”
I closed my eyes with a groan. Oh goody, we’d saved Caldswell. I opened my eyes again and looked around, actually using my cameras this time, and I saw that the world was bobbing up and down because Rupert was carrying me on his back. Caldswell was behind him, still in symbiont form and looking worse for wear but on his feet. He had a shape on his back too, a black scaly one. Brenton.
I shifted my position, moving my hands up to grip Rupert’s shoulders. As I did this, I noticed that my naked arm was clean again with no sign of the black soot. Relief flooded through me. I hadn’t realized how scared I’d been that I’d broken myself for good until I saw my normal skin.
“Put me down,” I said, looking at Rupert, whose scale-covered head was right beside mine. “I can run on my own.”
“No,” Rupert snapped with a vehemence that made me flinch.
“You scared him good back there,” Caldswell explained. “We couldn’t get you to wake up, and that black stuff was almost up to your neck.” He shook his head. “Trust me, you should just let him carry you.”
Rupert’s grip tightened possessively on me as the captain spoke, and I couldn’t tell if I was touched or annoyed by that. A bit of both, I decided in the end. But Caldswell was right, I wasn’t up for fighting Rupert. Now that I thought about it, I wasn’t sure if I was up for running, either. My skin might look fine, but my body felt like it had been chewed up and spit out.
“What happened?” Because I wasn’t sure how much of my dream was dream and how much was real.
“I’m not sure,” Caldswell said. “I was busy trying not to get my head bitten off, so I didn’t see where you came from. You just appeared on top of Reaper’s shoulder, perched up there like a little silver bird, and the moment you touched him, Reaper stopped.”
“He died?” I asked.
“No, he stopped,” Caldswell repeated, his voice going grim. “They all did, every single lizard. It was like someone pulled the plug on the whole tribe. I’ve never seen anything like it, but we didn’t stick around to spectate. We got you and ran.”
I took a long breath. So much for the dream theory. “You didn’t get near the black stuff, did you?”
“No,” Rupert said. “We stayed back until it faded.” His voice was tight, and I could tell that had not been his decision. “I have your Lady’s arm piece, by the way,” he added. “But I couldn’t put it on while you were unconscious.”
“Really?” When Caldswell had said they’d run, I’d thought for sure that the armor I’d shed to get away from Rupert was gone forever, so when he told me it wasn’t, the relief was almost too much to bear. “Thank you!” I cried, wrapping my arms around Rupert’s neck so hard I would have broken it if he’d been human.
Caldswell made a choking sound, but I ignored him, reaching out my bare hand. Rupert slowed down just enough to hand me the pieces he’d been carrying. I snatched them from him and put them back on with frantic glee. Elsie’s blade had been attached to my right arm, after all. If I’d lost her, that would make two blades I’d sacrificed to xith’cal, which was simply unacceptable. “How much farther?”
“We’re almost there,” Rupert said, his voice much less angry now. “We made much better time with no lizards to worry about.”
“So they’re really all dead?” I asked.
Caldswell shook his head. “No. Learn to listen, Morris. I said they stopped.”
“What he’s saying is that the xith’cal aren’t moving,” Rupert clarified. “But they’re not dead either. They just stopped where they were.”
Cold dread began to curl in my stomach. “They won’t be like that for long,” I whispered. “This is about to become another ghost ship.”
“We figured as much,” Caldswell replied. “That’s why we’re hustling. What I want to know is why the lelgis have stopped firing.”
I had no idea why the lelgis would stop shooting, considering they’d told me in no uncertain terms they were coming to kill me. I didn’t like the sound of it at all, though, and I messaged Hyrek for an update.
They backed off and stopped firing about five minutes ago, Hyrek reported. Now they’re just sitting out there. We haven’t seen any of Reaper’s tribe either, and all the ship feeds have gone dead. What’s going on?
“Just get ready to fly,” I said, pulling up the map of the slave roads my suit had drawn on our first trip through. “We’ll be there in two minutes.”
“Who are you talking to?” Caldswell asked.
I turned so I could grin at him. “Hyrek,” I replied, tapping my helmet. “Onboard computer and com, reason number eight hundred and one why powered armor is better than a symbiont. The crew knows we’re coming, and they’re getting the ship warmed up for us right now.”
“Good work, Morris,” Caldswell said, and though he was no longer my captain, I couldn’t help feeling smug.
Sure enough, we made it back to the little dock right when I said we would. It was empty, just like Hyrek had said. The ship Rupert had commandeered had its ramp down, and Mabel was waiting for us when we ran up.
“Everything’s ready to go so far as I can tell, sir,” she said, scowling at the shape on Caldswell’s shoulder. “Who’s that?”
“Brenton,” Caldswell replied, marching up the ramp.
“Wonders never cease,” Mabel said as the captain unceremoniously dumped Brenton’s unconscious body just inside the door.
“Let’s get moving, people!” Caldswell shouted, striding toward the front of the ship.
Mabel gave Rupert and me an appraising look, then she smiled and turned to follow Caldswell. I had no idea what that smile meant, but it hadn’t looked smug. If anything, I’d have said she looked relieved, but before I could think more about it, Rupert hopped up the ramp as well and set me down. Despite my fears, I was able to stand without help, mostly. I had to grab the door in the end, but I hid my wobble by making like I was leaning in to take stock of my surroundings.
The ship wasn’t actually as small as it had looked from the outside, and it was definitely a female ship. The ceilings were much too low for male xith’cal, though they were still high by my standards. Also, unlike the raiding ships I’d spent my career busting up, it was clean. Everything was clinically neat and orderly, from the little hall we were standing in to the labs that opened off it. A science vessel, then, and a nice new one at that. Or it looked new to me. I’m not much of an engineer in m
y own race. Xith’cal equipment was way above my pay grade.
I was still getting my bearings when arms wrapped around me, and I stumbled into Rupert. He’d dropped the scales over his head while I wasn’t looking, and he was hugging me like he was afraid I’d vanish. “Take off your helmet,” he whispered.
I didn’t bother arguing. The moment my helmet clicked, Rupert pulled it off and dove at me, his lips slamming into mine. It was a brutal, desperate kiss. Rupert was always intense, but this was different. He radiated fear and need as he clutched me tighter, making my suit creak, and as his power overwhelmed me, I started to realize just how badly I’d scared him.
Finally he broke the kiss, lifting up just enough to whisper against my lips. “Don’t ever do that again.”
“Not planning on it.”
“I’m serious, Devi,” he growled. “Never again. Promise me.”
“I’m not promising anything of the sort,” I said, pushing away. “I do what I have to do, Rupert. And we are not back on kissing terms.”
Rupert closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against mine with a frustrated sound. “We’ll talk about this later.”
I didn’t see what there was to talk about, but he was right. This was not the time. The ship was already spinning up. Rupert and I pulled apart, and he handed me back my helmet. I put it on as we walked to the front to see what we were up against.
The xith’cal bridge was surprisingly similar to every other bridge I’ve been on. There were the usual consoles against the walls and the pilot’s station up front facing the view port. Nova was sitting off to one side on a padded stool that was way too big for her, doing math on a touchscreen that took up an entire wall. The numbers must not have needed translation, because she was deep in an equation, though she did look up to give me a shaky smile when I stepped in.
Caldswell, still in symbiont form but with the scales off his head, had already occupied the captain’s chair. Mabel was nowhere to be seen, which probably meant she was back with the engine, but Basil and Hyrek were standing on either side of the captain. All three of them were staring at a big display screen covered in xith’cal chicken scratch and a big, round shape surrounded by a red cloud. As I got closer, though, I realized the haze on the screen wasn’t a cloud. It was dots, thousands of little red dots so close together they blended into a whole.
“Let me guess,” I said, pointing at the big round thing. “That’s the tribe ship”—I moved my finger to the thousands of red dots—“and those are the lelgis.”
“We’re doomed,” Basil moaned. “The xith’cal were fighting them before, but then everything stopped. Now they’re just sitting out there like hawks waiting for us to leave the nest.”
“Flying into that is not an option,” Caldswell agreed. “We’re just going to have to jump from here.”
“Are you crazy?” I shouted at the same time as Basil’s terrified squawk. “We can’t jump from inside a tribe ship! Every bit of debris is a variable in the jump equation, right? Even if we had a gate all to ourselves, which we don’t, we couldn’t figure a safe jump from a dirty floor inside a ship filled with atmosphere. The margin of error from the dust in the air alone is enough to get us lost in hyperspace for a hundred years!”
“You’d rather die to lelgis?” Caldswell asked, hitting a button on the enormously complicated panel beside him. “And we do have a gate to ourselves. Xith’cal tribe ships have hyperspace computers that provide far more accurate computations than our own gates can manage.”
“I thought we couldn’t get into the xith’cal computer,” I said.
We couldn’t before, Hyrek typed at me. But there’s no one left to stop us now, is there?
I stared down at the captain, who was sitting in the chair, working the xith’cal console like an old hand. “How do you know all of this?”
“Before my current employment, I was one of the captains the Republic Starfleet charged with stopping the xith’cal,” Caldswell replied. “I picked up a few things.” He glanced at Nova. “I’m sending you the jump coordinates now. How fast can we fly?”
“I’ve already got all the ship’s variables in, I think,” Nova replied, biting her lip as she fed the captain’s coordinates into her wall of incomprehensible math. “I’ve never worked with a system like this before.” She turned and flashed us a nervous smile over her shoulder. “Will a fifteen percent margin be acceptable?”
“I’ll take those odds,” Caldswell said, tapping a xith’cal-sized button at the top of his console. “Hold on tight.”
I felt the familiar vibrations of a hyperdrive coil spinning up. Xith’cal coils must have been better than ours, though, because the jump flash washed over us almost immediately, and as it finished, the whole ship tipped.
There’s usually a little bump when you enter hyperspace. This time, though, it was more like a mountain. The xith’cal ship lurched and rolled, dumping us sideways before the gravity cut out. But the turbulence lasted only a few seconds before the stillness of hyperspace took over, settling everything. The gravity came back a few moments later, dropping us to the floor.
“Where are we going?” I asked, pushing myself up.
“Dark Star Station,” Caldswell said, pulling himself to his feet. “The lelgis can track a ship through hyperspace, so we can’t outrun them with a jump. All we can do is go somewhere they won’t follow.”
I almost choked. According to Brenton, Dark Star Station was Eye headquarters, and Maat’s prison. “I can’t go there,” I said quickly.
The captain looked at me, but I held my tongue. He might be sitting around in his scales like it was no big deal, but saying Maat’s name in front of the crew still felt too dangerous for words. Fortunately, it didn’t seem necessary. Caldswell was already on the move. “I figured you couldn’t,” he said, hopping out of his chair. “That’s why we’re dumping you first.”
“Excuse me?” I said, but Caldswell was already jogging off toward the rear of the ship. “What do you mean, dumping?” I demanded, running down the hall after him.
“The only reason we were able to jump before they blasted us was because the lelgis didn’t want to risk getting near the infected tribe ship,” Caldswell said. “But even though they didn’t see us leave, they certainly felt us. Jumping from inside got us a head start, though, and I intend to make the most of it.”
By this point we’d reached the rear of the small ship. It was a crowded storage area not unlike the Fool’s cargo bay, but much smaller and mostly taken up by what looked like an escape pod, which Caldswell immediately started unhooking.
“The coordinates I gave Nova were for two jumps,” Caldswell said, hitting the winch that lowered the emergency ship. “The second is to the Dark Star. The first is to a nice, crowded little Republic cash system just inside civilized space.”
My eyes went wide. Cash systems were nothing but automated farming planets. They normally didn’t even have defense grids, much less anything that could stop the lelgis. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“Because that’s where you’ll be getting out,” Caldswell answered, jumping down to the lower bay where the tiny ship was now waiting. “We’re going to stop, dump you, and jump again before the lelgis can catch up. With any luck, they’ll be too busy chasing the target they expect to look for one they don’t.”
“Hold up,” I said. “You’re going to leave hyperspace, kick me out in the middle of nowhere, and then jump again in the hope the lelgis keep chasing you?” Caldswell nodded, and I gaped at him. “That’s a terrible plan!”
“Terrible plans are what we’ve got,” Caldswell said, opening the emergency ship’s glass canopy. “Get in.”
I didn’t want to do any such thing, but I didn’t want to stay here and fight with Caldswell either. So, with a long breath, I jumped down onto the lower deck beside him and hauled myself into the tiny alien escape pod. I was trying to figure out how I was supposed to sit on the xith’cal’s strange, long bench seat when I realized Rup
ert was getting in, too.
I hadn’t even seen him come into the back bay, but he was here now, dumping a black nylon duffel bag on the floor by my feet before plopping down in front of me, sliding between my legs on the long seat that had been built to hold one female xith’cal, not two people, one of whom was wearing armor. I was trying to get enough room for my knees when Caldswell handed Rupert something else. I was about to point out there was no way that thing was fitting when I recognized the sleek metal box.
“My armor case!” I cried, snatching it out of his hands.
“I grabbed it off the Fool before I left,” Rupert said, and though his voice was all business, I could hear the pride in it. “I thought it would be useful.”
I was so happy to see my case that I didn’t even care that it took up all the room I had left. If Rupert and Caldswell hadn’t both been looking, I might have hugged it. As it was, I wedged my case into the back of the tiny ship and leaned against it.
“Don’t let her do anything stupid,” Caldswell ordered as he closed the glass flight canopy over our heads.
I gave the captain a nasty look, but he’d already left, getting clear of the little ship as Rupert started the tiny engine. His head was still bare, which I took to mean that our escape pod had air for now, but I sealed my suit anyway, just in case.
“Can you even fly this thing?” I said as he settled his hands on something that looked sort of like a flight stick. “I thought you couldn’t read xith’cal?”
“It’s a simple ship,” Rupert answered with a shrug, reaching up to flip a row of switches along the cabin’s top. The first three toggles seemed to do nothing, but the fourth sealed the ship with an audible pop. “See?” Rupert said, looking back with a smile. “Best guess works.”
That did not make me feel better, but I didn’t get a chance to voice my opinion. Not three seconds after Rupert sealed our ship, the jump flash rolled over us again. I’d barely recovered from the feeling of being pulled back into time-space when the floor opened and our little ship was sucked into the vacuum of space.
